


Go Home Again (Maybe You Can)

by Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Challenge Response, F/M, Future Fic, Off-screen Character Death, Pack Dynamics, Rough Sex, Werewolf!Allison, the bite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-04
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-17 16:47:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/869775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sandrine/pseuds/Sandrine%20Shaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When her hunter life reaches its inevitable conclusion with a ring of bite marks on her flesh, it's Derek Hale she goes looking for.</p><p>
  <i>It's been eleven years. They didn't part on good terms, though that's hardly a surprise because she can't remember a time when they were ever on good terms to begin with.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Go Home Again (Maybe You Can)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for rashaka's prompt at the [Sterek Free Ficathon](http://thecivilunrest.livejournal.com/13653.html) on LJ.
> 
> Thanks to the lovely [glitterburn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/glitterburn/) for the beta!

She balls her fists (claws digging into her palms, drawing blood) and clenches her teeth (too long, too sharp, foreign in her mouth) and forces herself to look into the mirror.

Amber eyes stare back at her from a face that doesn't look like her own at all. Except that it is, and there's nothing she can do about it. 

She smashes the mirror. When the shards of glass cut deep into her hand, it's a pain she welcomes, but watching the wounds heal within seconds only drives home the fact that there's no way back.

* * *

It happens on a dark moonless night in the woods up in Oregon. She's been trailing what she thought was a rogue omega for days, a middle-aged female who's been attacking campers. Allison isn't a novice hunter anymore; it's been years since she was a desperate teenage girl who thought she had to prove something to anyone. She's learned to be patient, to trail her prey, draw it out and wait for the right moment to strike.

Doesn't mean that she's not making mistakes anymore.

She realizes how wrong – stupidly, fatally wrong – she's been when she has the werewolf cornered and her eyes flash red instead of the yellow Allison expected. It doesn't deter her even though maybe it should, but a lone, weakened Alpha without a pack is still no match for an experienced hunter, and to retreat now and call for reinforcements would mean losing precious time during which more people might get hurt. Allison can't risk that, and there's no need to. She can do this. 

She's strong enough to take the Alpha.

Her father has taught her well, and so have Kate and Gerard – with time, she's learned that appreciating the skills they've taught her doesn't mean she has to hate them any less for trying to instrumentalize her for their own fucked-up causes. Everything that happened to Allison in those frightening years when she was first thrown into a shadow world of supernatural monsters without warning helped her become the hunter she is now, and she's good at what she does.

The Alpha dies at her hands, Allison's knife slicing a clean, wolfsbane-stained cut across her prey's throat.

She only takes time to catalogue her own injuries afterwards. 

A couple of bruises on her arms and legs. Claw-marks down her chest. Sprained ankle. Bite on her shoulder.

* * *

_All right, then. Options._ Back in a ratty motel room, when a long hot shower has cleaned off the worst of the dirt and the blood, she forces herself to think, even though she wants nothing more than to pretend that she's fine, that nothing's wrong, that it's just a flesh wound that will heal like the bruises and the sprained ankle and the cuts on her skin.

She knows she needs to approach it reasonably, one step at a time, trying not to give in to the overwhelming desire to curl up and panic and rage at the world. 

The bite will either take or it won't. If it won't… Well. There's nothing she can do about that. It's not a train of thought worth following. She'll know soon enough.

She can either accept it or stop it before it's too late. There's no question what a hunter's way to deal with incidents like this is supposed to be. You don't become the very monster you hunt; you take your own life before you'd let that happen to you. It's probably part of some ancient code every hunter should abide by. But Allison stopped letting other people make rules for her when she was seventeen. The only rules she goes by now are her own, and something inside of her screams at the idea of killing herself. It seems such a cowardly way out, like saying _I'd rather die than deal with this._ Like admitting, _I'm too weak to deal with this._ And she's not weak.

She'll either deal with this alone, or she can get help. Ironically, this is the one choice she finds the hardest to make. For years now, she's been alone, and that's how she learned to tackle any obstacle: Don't ask for help. Don't put anyone else in danger. Handle your own messes. 

It costs her to admit that this might just be the sort of mess she cannot handle on her own.

* * *

Derek looks pretty much the same as he did when she last saw him, except with a few more lines on his face and a little gray at his temples, but the posture and expression when he opens the door are familiar in a way that's both unsettling and comforting.

It's been eleven years. 

They didn't part on good terms, though that's hardly a surprise because she can't remember a time when they were ever on good terms to begin with. She blamed him for her mother's death and he hated her for hunting down his pack. She thought he was a selfish, reckless asshole who turned kids into killers. He thought she was just like Kate. 

When her father died in the final big showdown with the Alpha pack, she blamed Derek for that too, because even though they'd been fighting on the same side, Derek was the reason the Alphas were in town in the first place.

The last time they saw each other, she told him that. Knew she had hit a nerve when she watched the flash of guilt on his face, and if she hadn't felt too angry and broken to muster up pity for anyone but herself, she would have tried to take the words back. She left town the same day and she never looked back, a decade on the road with no ties to her old life except for the crossbow in her hands and the knives strapped to her legs.

And now here she is, on Derek Hale's doorstep eleven years later with the bite (healed by now, for days already) itching on her shoulder and her claws ready to come out. He frowns and glares at her, and she wonders if it wasn't a mistake to come to him after all.

"Allison." She assumes it's supposed to be a greeting, but the way he says her name couldn't possibly make her feel any more unwelcome. "What do you—"

He stops abruptly, and something in the way he looks at her changes, recognition maybe, his senses telling him what she is. He doesn't say anything else, though, doesn't make a move to step aside, and she knows she'll have to swallow her pride or turn around and leave. 

And if she leaves, where else would she go? Her father is dead and Scott left town around the time when she did, destination unknown. There's no one else. She hasn't exactly been making lots of werewolf friends over the years as a hunter. There are some packs she knows, who try to stay under the radar and don't hurt humans. Occasionally some of them have helped her deal with rogue omegas in their territory, or maybe she was the one who helped them, but just because they teamed up against a common enemy doesn't mean she could go to them with this. 

That leaves Derek, who she's never liked or trusted, who for all she knows might laugh in her face when she asks him for help, but there's a part of her that can't help thinking that he _owes_ her.

She forces herself to look him in the eye. "Can I come in?"

* * *

Derek gets frustratingly aggravated when she tells him how it happened.

"It's supposed to be a gift," he bites out through clenched teeth, fingers brushing against her unmarred skin where the bite used to be.

She pulls back, annoyed both at his words and the way he touches her without permission, as if just because she's here to ask for his help, it makes her his territory. "Right. Like it was a _gift_ for my mom."

Derek recoils as if she'd hit him, and she regrets her words. It's so easy to fall back into old patterns, and she didn't come here for this. She takes a breath. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean— Look, what I was trying to say is, I don't blame her. The Alpha. I was hunting her and she was defending herself by any means. I blame her for ripping some innocent teenage girl's arm off and killing a couple of boy scouts, but a hunter trying to kill her is fair game. Biting me in the heat of the fight wasn't the grave breach of werewolf etiquette you're making it out to be."

He raises a mocking eyebrow at her. "I don't remember you being so forgiving." It sounds a little too bitter for her to brush it off with a casual, glib remark of being older and wiser like she wants to. 

She offers him an unhappy little smile instead and as much of the truth as she can bear. "It's always easier to forgive when it's just about yourself. When it's people you love getting hurt, it's harder to see past that. You of all people should know that."

For a long moment he just looks at her, like maybe he can't figure out if her words were meant as an apology for how she's treated him or as absolution for his part in her parents' deaths. She isn't quite sure herself what it is she's offering, only that it's an olive branch and she needs him to take it so they can get past all that anger and recrimination.

Finally he nods, and she thinks perhaps he understands. 

"What do you want me to do?"

"I don't think I can do this on my own." It's both easier and more difficult than she thought to admit this to him. "It's hard not to lose control when I get angry or upset. It's like I can feel the wolf raging inside of me. And I know it's going to get worse, and I don't— I can't hurt anyone. I can't risk that."

It's a downward spiral. Having to ask for help has been making her anxious and ill at ease already, and thinking about the possibility that she might hurt someone or worse makes her tenuous control shatter.

The instant she feels her frustration take over, it's already too late, and there's so much anger it blinds her vision for a moment that seems to simultaneously last for hours and pass in just a split second.

When she's herself again, she realizes that Derek's hands have seized her upper arms, firmly holding her in place, his grip tight enough that he'd leave marks that would last for days if she were still human. She isn't sure how much time has passed. Her face is hurting like it's been bruised, and so are her fingers, a dull, insistent pressure underneath her nails. There are gashes in his shirt that are stained red at the edges, but if there were wounds beneath it, they've already closed. 

"I hate this," she whispers harshly, irrationally embarrassed by her outburst. She always feels irrational since the night of the fight, like her emotions are as heightened as her senses are. 

"I know," he says, voice calm and quiet and a little sad, and she doesn't think he gets it.

She shakes her head. "Not being a wolf. I don't care about that. I didn't want it, but I can deal with it. But this. Not having control over myself. Not being in charge of my own body. I hate that."

She can feel the claws coming out again, and the only thing that's grounding her is the way Derek is holding on to her. 

"You'll learn how to control it. I promise you. I'll teach you."

* * *

The night of the first full moon is the worst.

The chains that hold her are electrified at a low current, just enough to let her transform but not allow her to break free, and it hurts like no physical pain she's ever known before. During the night, she's too feral to _think_ , but by the time the first morning light creeps into the cell, she's almost human again, and for the first time since she was bitten, she thinks that maybe she should have killed herself after all.

Derek gives her time enough to compose herself before he comes to cut her loose, and she's grateful for that. She knows he's been near all night, probably right outside the cell. She could smell him, _feel_ him, and the presence of an Alpha made her mindless rage stronger instead of calming it down.

When he unlocks the chains and holds her up until her injuries start healing, the way he looks at her makes her want to claw his eyes out. She doesn't want his pity. She knew it was going to be bad; she can handle it.

"You need to find an anchor," he tells her. "It's not going to get any easier until you find something to root you to your humanity."

The matter-of-fact tone grates on her nerves like wolfsbane in an open wound. He makes it sound so simple. She remembers back when Scott was bitten, how she used to be his anchor for a while. How Lydia's love for Jackson was the only thing that could fix him. 

Allison doesn't have that. She glares at Derek and pushes his hands away, standing on wobbly legs. "Yeah, well, that's not going to be so easy. I can't just make myself care for someone enough that it would override my instincts. There's not exactly an abundance of friends and family in my life, in case my coming to you wasn't enough of a hint."

Derek's jaw clenches as if he hears the hidden accusation in her words. Or perhaps he just doesn't like the reminder that he was a last resort for her.

"It doesn't have to be a person," he says. "A memory will do. Or an emotion, even if it's not positive. It used to be anger, for me. For years after the fire."

"And now? Are you feeling any less angry?" she wants to know, aware that the question is intrusive, that it's a private matter and none of her business, and not caring one bit.

He holds her gaze, his expression impassive. "My sister. My pack. For some of us, their anchor will stay the same their whole life. But when your life changes, so does your anchor. You should know. By the time he skipped town, you weren't Scott's anchor anymore, either."

She flinches but takes the unsubtle dig at how she left things without a retort. It's funny, she thinks. All those years, and they still know exactly what to say to each other to tear open old wounds.

"So, what you're saying is, I don't need to find something that works forever, as long as it works right now?"

Derek's mouth twitches into a lopsided smile. More of a smirk, really, but it makes his eyes crinkle and it looks sincere enough. It's the first time since Allison came back that she's heard any sort of humor in his voice. "Actually, what I was saying was, stop baiting me; I'm trying to help. But I guess that works too."

Allison ducks her head and surprises herself by chuckling. She feels a little embarrassed and a little apologetic and, strangely, a little relieved. "Sorry. Old habits."

"I know," Derek says. He's still smiling.

* * *

It gets better with time.

She's learning to control the change more often than not, at least on regular days when the moon is waning until it disappears and starts waxing again. The trick is to keep the wolf on a leash, but not lock it away completely. Accept that it's part of her, not a separate, hostile entity trapped inside of her human body.

It's harder than it sounds. Even harder, yet, because the hunter instincts she's honed over the years tell her that the wolf should be put down or safely contained, but now that the wolf is _her_ , she doesn't know what to do with those instincts anymore.

She finds her anchor. If anyone were to ask (though no one does, because apparently Derek has better manners than her or maybe he just doesn't really care to know), she'd tell them that it's her mother. It's not quite the truth, though, or not the whole truth anyway, because to be precise her anchor is the need to prove that her mother was wrong. That even when you're a hunter, you can tame the beast inside of you and live. To show Victoria Argent, even if she isn't around to see it, that she didn't need to take her own life and rob her teenage daughter of her mother.

When it comes down to it, Allison's anchor is not her mother at all but simply her own strength of will to see this through. The only thing her mother had to do with it was fuel it with her death.

* * *

Derek doesn't pull his punches with her, metaphorically and literally. He gets her angry on purpose, throws everything he can at her to make her lose control, and when she finally masters it and won't let herself be provoked, he pushes her some more until she cracks.

In the heat of the fight, she scores some hits of her own, claws striking quickly enough to surprise him or – more frequently – words that cut deeper and heal slower than physical wounds ever could. But all her victories are short-lived, and she soon finds herself thrown halfway across the room or pushed against the wall with Derek's arm unforgiving against her throat as he's staring her down with blood-red eyes and bared fangs. 

Part of her wants to bare her neck at him in submission, but there's another part that just wants to jump and tear out his throat. She fights it down because even if she were physically able to take him, she can't kill him. She knows she can barely handle being a Beta; suddenly having Alpha powers would send her off the rails for good.

 _You're not a Beta_ , a voice in the back of her minds corrects her. _You're still an Omega. Derek may be teaching you control, but he's not your Alpha._

But sometimes, when she's not dreaming of ripping his throat out and bathing in his blood, she thinks she wants him to be.

* * *

After a few weeks, Derek starts making her train with his pack.

He must have told them about her, because the first time Allison joins them, none of them seem surprised at their new sparring partner. There's Derek's sister, who Allison only met a handful of times back in the old days. She isn't sure if Cora even recognizes her. Boyd hasn't changed much. There's a quiet tranquility about him that has an oddly calming effect on Allison, despite their bad history, and she honestly enjoys his presence. The rest of the pack members are strangers to her – Boyd's wife Madison; a cheerful guy in his late twenties called Jake, and a stern older woman who reminds Allison a little uncomfortably of her mother.

They're all kind to her, offering assistance and advice without asking many questions about Allison's past or how she was bitten, and Allison returns the favor and never asks how they came to be members of Derek's pack. 

Even though she wants to, she doesn't ask Derek about what happened to Scott and Isaac, either. If they're still in touch. If they're happy. If they're _alive_. 

Maybe not knowing is the safer choice.

* * *

The third full moon, Derek doesn't chain her up. He still locks her in the cell, though, except this time, he's inside with her.

"I'm not ready," she argues when he tells her how it will go down, shortly before sunset.

"You are." The absolute certainty and confidence in his voice should make her proud, and maybe it would on any other day, but tonight her temper is even shorter than usual and all his words do is irritate her. 

She lets herself transform just a little, fangs dropping and eyes glowing a furious yellow. "Right. I forgot that you know me so much better than I do. I'll remind you that this was your idea when I tear you to shreds tonight."

When Derek tries to reach out towards her, she slaps his hand away, and his eyes flash red for a second. He takes a step back, looking frustrated. "Will you just trust me with this, Allison? You're strong enough to control yourself. And if it turns out that you're not, I can take you. No one's going to die tonight."

She scoffs and resumes pacing. 

"Sit down. Try to relax," Derek says.

It's easier said than done. She can feel the pull of the moon, getting stronger with every passing minute, like it has claws and it's trying to pry her head open. She can't stop the way her face changes, the way the fangs break through again, the flash in her vision, no matter how hard she focuses and how strong she wills herself to be. The concrete behind her crumbles as her fingers dig into it, and she doesn't even feel the pain.

"Breathe through it," Derek tells her, and it's so unfair that the full moon doesn't seem to be affecting him in the slightest.

She wants to sink her claws into him. There's all this restless, violent energy uncoiling inside of her, making her body drum. It demands an outlet, _needs_ one, and there's nothing and no one else to focus it on except for Derek. 

Her body moves before she's making the conscious decision to do so, pushing up from the ground and launching herself at him. Her attack, or at least the force of it, takes Derek by surprise because he doesn't shake off her quickly enough. She wraps her thighs around him and holds on. Her claws dig into his shoulders, tearing through fabric and flesh, and there's a fraction of a second when all her instincts scream at her to sink her teeth into his throat. And she could. She knows that she could, because despite what he said he's not strong enough to take her when she's like this, at a disadvantage because his mind is alert and his conscience is overriding his animal instincts.

She could hurt him, she could kill him, and it takes every ounce of control she still has to remind herself that she _doesn't want to_.

But all that tension pulsating in her blood still needs an outlet, so she bends her head and opens her lips and crashes her mouth onto his.

It's brutal and vicious, her teeth drawing blood, her lips so hard on his that they're bruising. She feels rather than sees his features changing, his fangs tangling with hers as he returns the kiss with the same violent intensity. All she tastes is blood, and all she smells is Derek, and right in this moment, she wants him more than she ever wanted anyone before, bloodlust and desire coming together in a heady, intoxicating rush.

Derek spins them around until her back is against the wall and he presses harder into her, the bulk of his body pinning her against the cold concrete behind her.

When he pulls back, his eyes glow crimson and the teeth he bares at her are stained red with their blood. He grabs her arms and holds them up against the wall.

"No," he growls, and maybe if she were in her right mind, she'd be able to figure out if he was angry with her, or disappointed, or if he was maybe just trying to do the right thing, but right now she doesn't care.

She snarls back and tries to catch his lips with hers again, but he pulls away. "Not like this."

He wrenches her off him and turns her to face the wall, trying to immobilize her, but she continues struggling, pushing her ass more firmly against his groin as she bucks against him. 

"Come on, Derek," she taunts, except it sounds almost like a plea. It's hard to think clearly enough to form words. Harder yet to find the right inflection. "Don't tell me you don't want this. I can feel it. You said you could take me, so come on and prove it."

The next thing she knows she's on the floor on her stomach, with Derek's hand merciless around the back of her neck, keeping her down no matter how much she struggles. "I don't need to prove anything," he tells her, leaning down so far that his voice is right next to her ear. "And you need to learn to control yourself, and not replace one instinct with another."

He doesn't let her up again until the night is over. She almost wishes the chains were back, because being tied up was a lot less degrading than this.

* * *

She doesn't talk to him the next morning. When he finally lets her go and has Boyd open the hatch, she pushes out past them and disappears into the guest bedroom where she's been staying for the past ten weeks, locking the door behind herself and not coming out for the rest of the day.

Exhaustion from the sleepless night makes her feel lightheaded and feverish, but she's too restless to find any sleep. 

It takes her a while to sort through the mess of her emotions. She's angry with Derek – or at least she thinks she is. Mostly, though, she's angry with herself, and embarrassed for acting the way she did. 

It's hunger that forces her out at last, though she waits until it's almost midnight and Derek will hopefully be asleep already. Instead, she finds him sitting on the couch, the lights from the TV screen casting shadows on his face. He looks up when she enters the room, and his eyes follow her as she makes her way to the kitchen. Neither of them says anything, the quiet noises from the television – some old film noir – the only sounds in the room.

She takes a box of half-eaten Chinese take-out from the freezer and scuffles back into the living room, silently sitting down next to him and starting to eat. She's half-waiting for him to start a conversation, half-relieved when he focuses his attention back on the movie.

The box is almost empty by the time she summons up enough courage to speak.

"I'm sorry," she says, awkwardly. She's always hated apologies because they serve nothing. They don't undo any damage; all they do is make you feel vulnerable. But still, right now she owes him this one. "I didn't mean to do that."

She feels him go rigid beside her, doesn't look at him as she makes herself continue. "It was unfair to pressure you like that, and I was definitely out of line for implying that you were somehow obligated to have sex with me just so I could control my instincts."

The couch dips as he moves, and from the corner of her eye she sees him leaning forward to reach for the remote, hitting the mute button before angling his body around to face her. When she turns her eyes to him, he's frowning. 

"I should have listened to you. You told me you weren't ready."

It's more of an apology than she ever got from Derek for anything, which is ironic because she doesn't really think he has anything to apologize for now. She shrugs and aims to keep her tone light, unsure if she's entirely successful. "It was worth a try. And I didn't try to rip your heart out and slash your throat, so I guess it wasn't a total failure. Apart from the sexual harassment."

Next to her, Derek huffs out a laugh, and when they fall silent again, it's almost companionable but for the tension that's still sparking between them.

"I didn't—" Derek begins, but stops himself and doesn't pick the sentence up again.

If it's so bad that he doesn't want to say it, Allison isn't sure if she really wants to hear it, but she asks anyway. "You didn't what?"

He doesn't respond immediately, and she watches his jaw working and the way his hands clench and unclench as if the claws are about to break through. 

"I didn't want to stop," he finally says, averting his gaze. "When you kissed me. But it was the full moon and you weren't yourself."

Allison isn't entirely sure what he's saying; if he stopped himself because she thought she didn't really want him or if he just thought it was counterproductive to her progress in mastering control. It doesn't matter, really. All that matters to her is that he _didn't want to stop_.

She puts the take-out box she's been holding on to the entire time down on the table and turns towards Derek, tentatively putting her right hand on top of his, stilling the way he keeps periodically tensing up and letting go.

"I'm myself now," she says quietly.

* * *

"I think you're ready," Derek tells her, after they spent the night of the full moon – her fifth now – sitting on opposite ends of the cell talking.

No claws, no broken bones, no blood-stained kisses. She still felt anxious, but maybe that was mostly because of the fact that she never had a conversation with Derek before that lasted more than a few minutes and didn't turn to insults and recriminations at some point. 

She'd shared some details of her life as a hunter, places she's been to, creatures she encountered. Derek filled her in on what happened in town while she was away. He told her, unprompted, that Scott had his own pack in Boston now, that he and Isaac came home for Christmas every year, and Allison felt like she could breathe a little easier knowing they were alive and well. She told Derek about her anchor, the whole truth, and it was the first time either of them mentioned her mother without any blame being passed. 

It was a quiet night, a sense of peacefulness about it that Allison didn't think she'd ever associate with the full moon again. She felt more at ease with her wolf than ever and, oddly enough, closer to Derek than she'd ever done before, despite the fact that she'd spent more nights during the past few months in his bed than in her own.

"You're as much in control as you'll ever be," Derek says, now. "I don't think there's anything else I can teach you."

There's a strange sense of finality about the situation, and Allison doesn't like it. 

She forces herself to sound cheerfully teasing, even though the melancholy of the moment is heavy and oppressive. "I feel a little like you got me housetrained and now you're pushing me back out into the world," she jokes, knowing that it falls flat.

Derek smiles faintly. "That's what you wanted, isn't it? You never asked me to be your Alpha."

It's a backhanded offer, but it's an offer nonetheless. The wolf inside her howls at the thought, and she's well enough in touch with it by now to know how much it likes that idea, how desperately it wants an Alpha. But she's also enough in control of it not to let her instincts get the better of her and override her mind. 

No matter how much her wolf wants a pack, she isn't sure if she can handle following an Alpha. Her family brought her up to be a leader, and later she was on her own for too long to be comfortable with the idea of deferring to someone else to make the decisions now. 

More so, she's not sure if she can handle _Derek_ being her Alpha; what it would mean for them and the attraction burning between them if she wasn't his equal.

"I don't know if I want you to be my Alpha," she tells him with blunt honesty. She watches his jaw set, disappointment or anger – she can't tell, but she knows she only has a few seconds to make him understand or else he'll push her out of his life and she'll lose whatever they could have, so she presses on. "I don't know what I want you to be. This is all new and kind of scary. My instincts are all over the place when it comes to you, and it's hard to figure out what that means. I just— I'd like to stay. If I can." She deliberately doesn't say 'if you let me' because he is _not_ her Alpha, and she doesn't want to sound like she's asking for permission.

Slowly, Derek's face softens as she watches him, and she thinks maybe he gets it. 

He crosses the distance between them, offering her a hand to pull her up. When she's on her feet, he doesn't let go, his hand firm and warm around her own, lacking the calluses she'd expect from someone his age who's spent the better part of his life fighting. 

"We'll figure it out together," he promises.

* * *

They're on the couch in Derek's living room, making out like teenagers (except, when Allison was a teenager, she hunted Derek down with a crossbow, and when Derek was a teenager he was sleeping with her aunt who then slaughtered most of his family, and even though the wounds have healed, the scars still itch sometimes, so they try not to think of it like that), when Allison finds herself wolfing out, a hair-trigger response as Derek trails a line of kisses and gentle bites down her neck.

He breaks away and raises an eyebrow at her. His lips twitch. "Maybe your control isn't as good as I thought."

Allison smiles back at him, fake-sweetly, before raking her claws down his chest, shredding his shirt and scratching at his skin. "Maybe your lessons just failed to cover all possible triggers."

Truth is, she feels just as much in control of the wolf now than she ever was of herself before. She's always going to have a bit of a temper, she's always going to be running a little too hot, but now she has a handle on the intensity of her reactions. There's no more risk of her going feral on anyone now than there was of her turning her crossbow on them before, for whatever that's worth. 

"Yeah? Well, maybe we'll just have to start all over again then," Derek taunts, perched over her, keeping his distance when she tries to pull him back down.

She narrows her eyes and, using her werewolf strength, flips them around until he's the one on his back and she's lying on top of him. She isn't sure if he let her, or if the move just surprised him too much to resist, but she's leaning towards the second option since his eyes are suddenly burning crimson and she can feel the prickly sensation of claws against her skin.

"Perhaps we should test your control first," she says, laughing, before she leans down and swallows whatever comeback he would have made with her lips on his.

Neither of them notices when for an instant, her eyes flare fiery red.

End.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are very much appreciated. :)


End file.
